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BL Add. MS 28268, ff. 143–44;
published in Hart, p. 38

For permission to publish the text of MSS in their possession, the editors wish to thank the Beinecke Rare
Books and Manuscript Library, Yale University; Berg Collection of English and American Literature, The New
York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations; the Bodleian Library Oxford University; the
British Library; Boston Public Library; the Syndics of Cambridge University Library; the Syndics of the
Fitzwilliam Museum Cambridge; Haverford College, Connecticut; the Historical Society of Pennsylvania; the
Hornby Library, Liverpool Libraries and Information Services; the Houghton Library, Harvard University;
the John Rylands Library, Manchester; the Kenneth Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas; Luton
Museum (Bedfordshire County Council); Massachusetts Historical Society; McGill University Library; the
National Library of Scotland; the Newberry Library, Chicago; the New York Public Library (Pforzheimer
Collections); the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York; the Public Record Offices of Bedford, Suffolk (Bury
St Edmunds) and Northumberland, the Master and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge; the Society of
Antiquaries of Newcastle upon Tyne; the Trustees of the William Salt Library, Stafford, the Wisbech and
Fenland Museum; the University of Virginia Library.

A research grant from the British Academy made much of the archival work possible, as did support from the
English Department of Nottingham Trent University.

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Bloomfield's spelling has not been regularized.

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in brackets.

& has been used for the ampersand sign.

£ has been used for £, the pound sign

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decimals.

I feel very much relieved myself since receiving your kind and
sensible letter. I had formed to myself a picture of the party who wrote under
the signiture of B. C. which I am very agreeably surprised to find wrong. I had
conceived the writer to be perhaps himself in search of preferment in the Navy,
and having probably no very honourable intentions as to the family of the
officer lately deceased; and I wrote in the moment of irritation what perhaps
more sober reflection would have condemn’d; I wrote as I felt. After this
apology on my part, I beg you will assure the young man that I send back his
letter with much pleasure to myself, and an high opinion of your candour and
interest in his behalf. Tell him by no means to despair of success in the
persuit of poetry; but let him exert his faculties under the guardianship of
moral Truth, and a conscientious regard for his own character, and then there is
no great fear of offending, but certainly great hopes of the contrary. Tell him
Sir, that I can have no possible claim whatever on the present he encloses. I
would much rather give him my hand if I could reach him. I have five young
children of my own, and I trust I have a Father’s feelings too.

I am much pleased with so fair an understanding in this little
business, and certainly shall not by any means give an unpleasant sensation to
your young friend by making mention of what I am sure he will hereafter see to
have been improper as to himself, and rather hard of digestion on my part.

With many thanks Sir, for your letter, and Respects to both, I of
course return the Note; which you will not understand but with the sincerest
regard to justice and the most obvious fulfillment of common civility. I have no
claim on your friend; but feel gratified and entirely at ease from your
communication.